January 14, 2010

'The White Ribbon' -- 3 1/2 stars

Christian Friedel as the school teacher and Leonie Benesch as Eva in "The White Ribbon." (Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

Austrian writer-director Michael Haneke once cited Roberto Rossellini’s “Germany Year Zero” (1948), shot in postwar Berlin, as a key influence on his cinematic thinking. The devastating story of a young boy’s corruption in the midst of literal and spiritual rubble posed a question: How did it come to this?

“The White Ribbon,” Haneke’s latest film, tries to answer that question by way of historical prologue. Set a generation earlier in 1913, it relays a mystery, or rather a series of mysterious, increasingly vicious cruelties perpetrated by unknown parties in a northern German village. True to Haneke’s temperament and stern moralist’s outlook, “The White Ribbon” does not itself go in for much nuance of human behavior. There are a fragile handful of good people being suffocated by an ever-tightening circle of bad. Watching the daisy chain of events is akin to auditing a seminar on incipient fascism taught by a master filmmaker who speaks in a steely murmur, confident of his research.

It is a silvery panorama, originally shot in color but transformed into mesmerizing black and white, of repressed and sporadically released anguish. Haneke’s vision is gripping. The craftsmanship, classically shaped narrative and icy visual beauty cannot be denied.

The title refers to a symbol of innocence and purity. The Protestant village pastor (Burghart Klaussner, perfect in his fastidious self-regard) punishes his children for various infractions by making them wear the ribbon. He suspects one son of masturbation; why else, he reasons, would the boy have become so “depressed and joyless”?

Meanwhile a daughter, Klara (Maria-Victoria Dragus, who appears to have stepped out of a German-language version of “Village of the Damned”), acts as ringleader of a roving group of children. They may be responsible for the rash of bizarre incidents recalled by the village schoolteacher (Christian Friedel as a young man, Ernst Jacobi in present-day voice-over). The first of these incidents involves the local doctor (Rainer Bock) nearly killed in a horse-riding accident, owing to a metal trip-wire strung between two trees near the doctor’s home. Later, one of the tenant farmers in the employ of the local baron (Ulrich Tukur) loses his wife in an accident.

The underclass resentments toward the overlords simmers, dangerously. Everyone has secrets. One family’s child endures sexual abuse; another family’s children reprocess their own violent humiliations on others, including the developmentally disabled boy of the doctor’s long-suffering midwife (Susanne Lothar). “The White Ribbon” ties a meticulous bow on a big theme, that of the roots of fascism in any society, and the malignancy, as Haneke perceives and infers, in Germany’s national character in particular.

The filmmaker has dealt before with intimations of national guilt, most brilliantly in “Cache,” which remains one of the richest and most confounding achievements in contemporary filmmaking. (Also it boasts the most dazzlingly open-ended coda in pop fiction, alongside the finale of “The Sopranos.”) Unlike “Cache,” however, “The White Ribbon” risks only so much narrative evasion. The elegance of its period re-creations offers a kind of cinematic solace, even when things are getting more awful by the minute. Haneke and his spectacular (and frequent) cinematographer, Christian Berger, transform the scenes into crisp, brutal, beautifully acted vignettes. “The world won’t collapse,” characters keep saying, yet of course it’s about to do just that.

I wish Haneke didn’t spell out things so clearly when the baroness decries her surroundings as a breeding ground for “malice, envy, apathy and brutality.” The filmmaker’s best work has typically found a way to freak us out obliquely, at least until it’s time for the sledgehammer. Haneke is very likely the coldest great filmmaker we have, and here he wants to show us how Nazi ideology could gain a foothold and then a stranglehold on an entire populace. (Playwright Odon von Horvath was doing the same in his stunningly prescient plays of the 1920s and early ’30s.)

The precise answer to the question of “The White Ribbon” — who is doing these horrible things? — isn’t the issue here, Haneke argues. The evil lies deep in the psyches and the beliefs of these blinkered people. No one mentions the word “Jew” in this fiercely Protestant microcosm, yet a key scene between the pastor and the schoolteacher suggests that the pastor is all too willing to scapegoat the teacher, who may be Jewish (it’s never stated), if it means maintaining the corrosive status quo.

“The White Ribbon” is methodical and dispassionate but not without hope, thanks to the improbably (for Haneke) sweet courtship of the teacher and the baron’s nanny (Leonie Benesch). Also, a heartbreaking preteen actor named Thibault Serie plays Gustav, the pastor’s son who has somehow escaped the poisons swirling around him. With this casting, and this character, Haneke is saying to us: If this darling, seemingly incorruptible figure is spared, we’ll have to chalk it up to sheer, blind luck.

Comments

I saw this movie last night, and I don't give it as high an appraisal as you Mr. Phillip, but I like what Haneke is trying to do, what he's trying to say. I just wish he could have said it in less than 2 hrs. and 25 mins.

I have to say that apart from the main storyline of the children, the pastor, doctor and baron, I actually liked the chaperoned courtship plan of the nanny's father. Give it a year, and if you (the school teacher) still feel the same way, then marry my daugther. It'll give him one less mouth to feed. It seemed so appropriate, so pithy of this rural, hard-nosed man.

I saw Cache and I found it frustrating. Given that, I had no intention of seeing this movie, however I found your At the Movies discussion with A.O Scott fascinating, especially how this movie really seemed to provoke a reaction with him. If my summary is accurate, your co-host posited that a point made by Haneke in this movie is that European liberalism stems from an underlying guilt from the Holocaust or its imperialism, the World Wars etc. I don't know if I agree with that, but on Scott's reaction and your review I intend on seeing it, at the very least renting it. Thanks!

This is the second Haneke film I've seen -- the first was Cache -- and I came away from both movies with a similar sense of frustration. On the one hand, he's an uncanny craftsman. Cinematically, these movies are beautiful. The Haneke-penned dialogue is crisp and compelling. And the methodical pacing is perfect. (It's telling that his movies can go entirely without music and yet not seem dull.) Haneke is plainly a master of ominous, creepy suspense.

On the other hand, what is Haneke trying to say? Anything true, or even coherent? I'm worried that the plots, themes, and ideas of these movies are shallow and don't withstand scrutiny, and that, while these movies are cinematic successes, they're literary failures.

Take "The White Ribbon" (with the oddly untranslated subtitle, "A German Children's Story"): Phillips rightly homes in on Haneke's ambition to "explain some things" that went on in Germany when the Kinder grew up to rally behind the Nazi Party. But the movie doesn't come close to fulfilling that ambition, even in a loose or metaphorical way.

Two possible explanations are put forward: (1) Child abuse causes Nazis. (2) Germanness causes Nazis. Neither has any explanatory power. Are we to suppose that child abuse of the sort depicted was a uniquely German phenomenon? Are we to suppose that German kids were uniquely rotten? Are we to suppose that German villages around this time were hotbeds of depravity, while rural villages in other corners of the globe were quaint and lovely? And, if nothing we're seeing is supposed to be specific to Germany or Germans -- if it's merely a glum and glib assessment of human nature -- then the explanation explains nothing about Nazism except to say that evil is possible. But that's trivially obvious.

So, Haneke's provocations -- among them, those nasty kids and the cruelest bit of dialogue I think I've ever heard -- end up seeming like just that -- provocations, which, however compelling in the moment, don't actually help us understand anything broader -- about Germany or, for that matter, human nature. All we can reasonably extract from them is that these particular kids are nasty, due in part to child abuse, and that the particular guy who spews that cruel dialogue happens to by a first-rate jerk.

I sense that Phillips sees these potential problems, so he tries to have the movie say more than it does about incipient Nazism. The school teacher, he says, may be Jewish. I saw nothing at all to suggest that, other than the fact that the actor who portrays him, whose first name is Christian, has puffy features. Besides, he's not subject to any persecution or mistreatment. The threatened scapegoating to which Phillips refers is fully understandable without reference to the teacher's identity. The character in question would have behaved in the same manner no matter who was confronting him. So, no, I don't think Jews or Jewishness in Germany are even obliquely referenced in the movie.

So, yes, this is a strikingly well-crafted movie with a story that keeps your attention through the end. But it also invites you to think about it. When you do, it falls flat.

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